Because there was a specific question asked here I'll answer it here: The swine flu is an influenza-like virus that can transmit across animal-human AND human-human contact. Furthermore it has antigenic components H1N1, which for infectious disease doctors, is bad news. Furthermore, we think that part of the pathology is in fact an autoimmune reaction AND what actually kills people is a secondary bacterial pneumonia.
Fortunately there does appear to be medications that will help: Relenza and Tamiflu.
That's about it in a nutshell. Since this a duplicate, I'll lock it now.
